Fiona's 3rd Birthday Party

This afternoon Grandma, Grandpa, Cathy, Erik, Ryan, Emily and Andrew came over to celebrate Fiona's 3rd Birthday! She'll be 3 on Tuesday so today was the family party day.

Side note: Happy Birthday to my brothers David and Robert whose birthday is today! I counted on my fingers and I guess they are 26, which seems like it could not possibly be true! Well, Happy Birthday anyway! ;-)

Now a random assortment of photos will follow.

Grandma and Grandpa gave Fiona a castle tent and she was so excited! Here she is crammed in there with all of her MN cousins...

Cathy and Erik and their kids gave Fiona a really cool glow in the dark drawing toy which she had a lot of fun playing with inside her tent.

Adele got a present too and was really excited about it!

I made a rainbow cake... Fiona likes rainbows a lot right now and was really happy about the cake! I was happy that I managed to get it all baked and assembled in time despite the 45 minutes of unplanned sheltering we did in the basement due to the nearby nearby tornado.

I didn't make enough frosting to cover the whole thing (turns out 6 layers is a LOT of cake), but on the plus side you could see the rainbow on the outside too :-)

It was so fun inside!

Nom nom nom nom nom. All that food coloring and sugar and birthday excitement made for a pretty fantastic party! Here we all are (except Ben, who is taking the photo).

Happy Birthday Party Fiona! I can't believe you are almost 3!

Updates, excuses...

I'll begin with the excuses... Adele doesn't sleep!! If I'm lucky she'll sleep for a couple of hours in the morning (on mornings when Fiona is at daycare I use this to frantically catch up on work) and then if she does nap for more than 10 minutes in the afternoon Fiona puts a lot of effort into waking her up as efficiently as possible. Then in the evening I put her to bed and begin dinner. She wakes up. I put her back to bed and resume making dinner. She wakes up. Repeat until I manage to eat my dinner very fast, then put her back to bed again until around 10.30 when she finally gives up and goes to sleep. After this we go to bed and on a good night she only wakes up once, on a normal night it's 2 or 3 or 5 times. Anyway, the point is that she makes me very tired. And that's my excuse for not making more bloggings!

So the good news is that she doesn't seem to need sleep to grow, and at her weight check appointment yesterday weighed in at 12lb 10oz. She's still very tiny (somewhere in the 5th - 10th % compared to 5 month olds, nowhere near being on the charts compared to 7 month olds) but is growing steadily and is healthy, which is all the doctor wants to see.

Adele gets more cute and interactive every day. I have so many pictures of her being adorable and making cute faces...

She is fascinated with Fiona and they get along fairly well most of the time. They spent some time together in a boat...

And just hanging out...

She loves to lie on the floor and watch Fiona playing.

Fiona has a little dolls house with a Mummy, Daddy and Baby. She also has a garage with a random man and a mechanic. In addition to this she has a variety of duplo animals. She loves to play with them all together and when I was sorting through the photos I came across this gem...

Yes, there are three people in that bed, and a variety of farm animals are sharing the bedroom. The baby is also haphazardly thrown into bed upside down. I swear, this is not an accurate representation of life in our house...

Look how happy she is...

But that is not all! Doggie and Daddy get to rest...

While Mummy does the laundry and baths the baby...

She also commentates the goings on in the house, which can sometimes involve the Mummy shouting angrily at the Daddy... usually telling him to get out of bed... um... nope, never happens in real life. Eeek!!

Along with the playing, she's now able to pretend something that isn't really happening... like pretending to be cold. What's even funnier is that when she really is cold, like after a bath, this is exactly what she does to show that she's cold. When I watched this I laughed so hard that it hurt...

I was going to also talk about guacamole and croutons because I know I've been neglecting to share my recent culinary adventures but Adele just woke up for the 7th time this evening so I'm going to save those for another time... it's fascinating stuff though, so look forward to it!

Daddy and his Girls

Another Father's day has come and gone, and with it the annual trip to Fuddruckers. We go more than once a year since it's Ben's second favourite restaurant (but don't tell it that it was bumped from the #1 spot, it was there for many, many years) but we have a tradition of going there to celebrate Father's day. This year involved an even earlier wake up than last year since Adele was up for the vast majority of the hours between 11pm and 6am the night before, and when Fiona woke up around 6.30am I don't think I even remembered it was Father's day before giving Ben a (loving) poke in the ribs. In addition to that, he also had to make his own Father's Day breakfast. I'm sure Fiona helped though. She's useful like that ;-)

For nostalgia's sake, here's the photo series...

2008

2009

2010

Yes, they were taken with Ben's phone because I forgot the camera. And yes, he's wearing the same shirt as 2009, but I swear I've washed it since then. I'm not that far behind on laundry.

After lunch we also went to Best Buy, so Ben had a really nice day. Happy Father's Day!

In other news, Fiona has been being a funny goofball and a smartie pants. She has been doing a lot more pretend play, and has been putting her toys to bed, acting out little plays with them, etc., which is hilarious and adorable...

Until she decided to play at being a puppy...

At least all that doggie water isn't hurting her brain... here she is counting!

I love that she poses for a picture in the beginning of the video. She's whining at the end because she wanted me to give her the camera so she could take pictures.

Adele has been smiley and happy, but then Fiona gave her the cold and she's been pretty miserable for the last few days. She has a nasty cough and an ear infection, but hopefully the antibiotics will have her sorted out in the next few days.

Here's a video of her being happy. For some reason she loves to lie in the bathroom on the changing mat. Sometimes when I need to put her down and do something I'll put her in there and she lies there quite happily for a while. It's odd, but it's the only way the small amount of laundry I do ever gets done :-)

I'm sure there are many other important things that I am forgetting, and I know I have a lot of food experiments to share, but I'll have to try to remember them another day because it's bedtime. These girls are fun, but also completely exhausting :-)

Fiona's House

A few months ago I made Fiona a house using her carseat box. Recently she's started to play inside it. She likes to gather all of her cuddly toys inside it...

And then she throws them all out again...

She thinks this is very funny!

If they're lucky, she'll give them all a cuddle at some point, but this game mostly consists of merciless stuffed animal torture.

I made a video of her in action, but it seems that the files are way too big for blogger to handle, so you'll have to check it out on flickr.

So goofy.

Spring = Yard Work

Since October last year we've had a giant pile of leaves sitting in our back yard... they were raked, but never quite made it into bags. Since then, more leaves fell, as did tons of nobbly offerings from our neighbour's tree, which we are so lucky to have half of hanging over our yard. During the winter we cleared out our basement, and some of the old shelves and junk took up residence outside. Combined with six months of accumulated dog poo, all we needed was a car on cinderblocks to complete the picture. It looked bad.

Last week the sun came out, and I was wishing that Fiona could feel the warm grass between her little toes, but sadly you could barely see the grass under the... well... you know. So this weekend Ben and I decided to tackle the mess. 

Fiona was hungry, so Ben fed her lunch while I raked the leaves. This is her 'no thanks, I'm done' face.

Here I am... working so hard! See how much better the first half looks! During my excavation I found all kinds of things like old lost bones and rarely seen white dog poo. Exciting!

Here's Ben picking up the leaves. You can see where the pile used to be.

I even managed to decipher the heiroglyphics included with the play set that Ben's coworker donated to us and I built a little swing and slide for Fiona. And here's the finished product in our newly tidy back yard!

It looks much better. The only downside is that despite it only being April, my freakishly pale Scottish skin managed to soak up enough sun for a toasty sunburn. Time to break our the factor 45!

Fiona's adventure with a train

My Uncle Michael and Aunty Julia, and my cousins James, Chris, and Catherine are visiting us for a while. Well, they were, but then they needed to take a break from visiting us and went to Vegas for a few days. They'll be back on Thursday.

When they arrived, they had a mysterious pink suitcase with them, and when they opened it we found it was full of Brio! Brio is a Swedish wooden train set with jigsaw ends so you can build all kinds of tracks. We loved to play with Brio when we were little, then passed what we had on to James, Chris and Catherine. They added some seriously cool parts - like a drawbridge and battery operated train - and then a few years later decided that since they were finished playing with it, that they'd pass it on to Fiona. 

Fiona loves the train! Aside from enjoying the tasty wood flavour, she likes to watch it go round the track, and sometimes will crawl around after it, trying to catch it. When we first built it, she'd giggle like crazy whenever the train would go by. 

Here is a video of Fiona and the train. Monty was intrigued, but a little nervous... 

Another game she likes to play is to pick up the pieces one by one and put them on the table. And then throw them onto the floor. And then pick them up and put them on the table, and then throw them on the floor... and pick them up and put them on the table... you get the idea... I think this is going to be a lot of fun!